


I'm Not Home If I'm Not With You

by Samsara (orphan_account)



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Happy Ending, M/M, Marriage, Multi, Spoilers, Titan Subculture, Two Very Gay Boys In Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-05 11:11:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1093208
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Samsara
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They were welcomed home, even if they had failed their mission. </p><p>But for Reiner Braun, his home wasn't complete unless Bertholdt could be a part of it. He had killed the soldier in himself to show his love and his loyalty, but now what? How did he prove his love now that they were home?</p><p>Well clearly, it had something to do with that ring in his pocket.</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm Not Home If I'm Not With You

**Author's Note:**

  * For [TAYLOR :D](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=TAYLOR+%3AD).



> I normally write Bertholdt, so this...is an experiment for me. I just want these three kids to be happy. I just want to think that can still go home and everything will be okay.
> 
> So folks: Here's Reiner Braun trying to propose to Bertholdt.

They didn’t arrive home as heroes. But they were welcomed regardless. There were no victory celebrations by the village council. There were no great feasts. No one had told those children that they were allowed to come home if it got too rough. They did their best and that was what mattered. No one had told them that it was a coming of age journey for the four of them. No matter how well or poorly they did – they would have all been welcomed home.

“Four?” they had asked. The guilt apparent in all their faces, they had planned to tell their relatives and elders that Berik had decided to remain with mankind, his identity never having been discovered. But much to their surprise, sitting in the Fubar household, a can in his hands was the eldest of the group. They argued briefly, asked why he didn’t return to them. He told them about being thrown up only a few miles from their village by that titan who’d eaten him. His leg never grew back after the ordeal, having to need a prosthetic in its place.

No one had told them that heroes or not, they were always welcome home.

And with their arrivals, all of them went their separate ways. Annie to her small home with her father on the outskirts of town. The man had held his daughter tight in his arms, holding the back of her head as the boys saw how her face softened into tears as she cried about missing her father. She wept for how hard it was to be so strong. She wept for the friends she had made and those who had lost their lives. But she wept because she was home.

Bertholdt lingered a moment, his fingers entwined with Reiner’s as he looked him in the eye. They didn’t notice when they had become intimate, but it had happened, and they hated separating their hands from one another. They would see one another the next day. They needed to go about looking for work now. They were men in their society now, after all. Warriors no longer, they had earned their keep and they could just be men.

He separated from Reiner and went inside with his mother, Berik and Berik’s lover, a young man surely about five years older than Berik who looked very similar to Reiner although had a small, freckled nose and a rounder jaw. Bertholdt’s father had passed away of illness the winter prior, and the look of grief was evident on the widow Fubar’s face. Although Reiner saw she was doing just fine, now that her two sons were here. Their life could return to normal.

But Reiner had a mission still. His did not revolve around walls, or titans, or war in the slightest. His mission had to do with the ring in his pocket.

Unlike Bertholdt, he had remembered when things had started to get intimate with them. He remembered it started sometime when they had enlisted in training together. How they were assigned the adjoining bunks. It was when he discovered how Bertholdt slept when he was in a bed. It was when he found that Bertholdt’s position had led to him being ridiculously overwhelmed with the desire to kiss that boy.

And he did, only to have Bertholdt’s eyes spring open and accuse Reiner of being weird. His only retort was: “I’ve never seen someone so kissable.”

He knew that in the past years among humans that no matter where his mindset lay one thing always stood out: he was falling in love with Bertholdt Fubar. He was desperately vying to impress him. To receive his attention and his affections. He wanted to know if he was the one who Bertholdt gazed at too. But most days – he saw that gaze lay upon Annie. He swore for ages that Bertholdt was looking at Annie. But what he’d never understood was he was looking at Annie because she was looking at Reiner. Because Reiner was looking at Bertholdt.

He had never noticed that connection. So he would stare at Historia. He would make moves on her, trying to see how Bertholdt reacted. To see if he was in his favor. He’d only ever noticed Bertholdt averting his gaze.

It wasn’t until later Reiner realized Bertholdt only looked away due to his own jealousy.

He didn’t know why or how Bertholdt continued to harbor any sort of feeling for him. With the way his mind bounced around between identities and the way his affections wavered based on the person. Reiner didn’t understand how Bertholdt could look at him the way he did.

Some nights in their bunks Reiner would get handsy. He’d grope Bertholdt through the sheets. He’d kiss along his neck and shoulders. He’d pull sounds from the boy that no one else could make. No one said anything. The boys in their cabins were often fooling around with one another. Teenage boys and sexual tension runs higher than temperatures in a fever ward.

It took Reiner a while to realize that it wasn’t just him and Bertholdt screwing around. Fucking. Banging. Choose your euphemism.

It took him a while to realize it fit more into the category of love making. Stupid as it sounded.

Reiner had slept with a number of the boys in their regime. He’d by lying if he hadn’t had his dick in all their mouths at least once. He’d also be lying if he said he hadn’t had his hand with some of the women too – but they had never proven to be his style. They didn’t get his blood moving the same way one of the boys could. Sure, sex with them was enjoyable enough. But he was much more interested in climbing into bed and wrapping his large, calloused fingers around Bertholdt’s

Wrists as he held him down to the bed and kissed his chest only before taking his cock into his own mouth, overjoyed with the gentle throb be felt in the veins as his lips in his shaft while his lips pursed his length.

Women were great but nothing beat a firm cock in his mouth. And cock was great too, but nothing beat Bertholdt’s.

The two of them would experiment. Positions. Who was on top. Forms of intercourse. Location. They would change it up whenever they had the chance and after a while it was no secret that they had done more than just fool around on occasion.

Soldier or not, Reiner knew that he was falling head over heels for Bertholdt and there was nothing he could do about it. All he could do was make it seem as if he was less invested in their relationship than he really was. Bertholdt seemed to be a champion at disconnect. He didn’t let his private time with Reiner influence his personality.

And what killed Reiner the most was that their private time didn’t seem to influence his feelings for him either. Had he been falling for the wrong boy – he needed to show him he was strong. He could protect him.

No matter the mindset, Reiner always had memory gaps. He couldn’t figure out when he said what. Or if he said something at all. The only connectors between the identities was whether or not Bertholdt was acting a certain way.

As a soldier, there was a distance to Bertholdt that often resulted in nights with him turning his back on Reiner. Cold comments of, “Don’t touch me.” Or “I hate you like this.” Would always bury themselves into Reiner’s soul and he’d be left in a fitful, restless sleep, wondering whether or not Bertholdt’s words were sincere.  He’d wake in the morning usually as a warrior again and he’d reach out and touch Bertholdt’s hand or shoulder, and most of the time he’d be greeted with something soft and soothing, whispering: “There you are.”

Bertholdt loved the warrior. Not the soldier.

And so Reiner had to kill the soldier in him.

Well naturally that’s why they were home, wasn’t it? It was because Reiner had to reveal their identities and escape and shortly after their departure – Annie had broken free from her tomb and joined them.

With the soldier dead, the warrior matured into a man – suddenly Reiner could see how Bertholdt really looked at him.

His eyes didn’t have the same sadness once Reiner began to recover. His features not as worried. His flesh not as clammy. Reiner no longer had to be the one to initiate contact between the two. Bertholdt had taken his hand several times. He’d been the one to coerce Reiner into taking his clothes off a most literal romp in the hay on their trip home. Most of the time Annie would take this as an opportunity to gather firewood – but on occasion they’d pull her into the fray. They didn’t love her they the way the loved one another, but they still loved her enough to let her in a bit. They didn’t force her if she didn’t want to.

They hadn’t realized there was a human back there that she’d grown attached to. She wouldn’t say who, but they left it at that.

But after all these years of slowly falling in love with a boy whom he didn’t know loved him Reiner was left with a small ring in his pocket, given to him by his father. And only one person to give it to: Bertholdt.

He sat at his kitchen table with his father, a half dozen young children running around the house as his mother tried to herd them into their living room or separate bedrooms so their biggest brother could talk with his parents privately. At the table, Reiner sat with his head in his hands, staring at the small, pewter ring. It wasn’t a precious metal but it was enough that to Bertholdt it would stand in nicely as an engagement ring.

“Are you sure you’re old enough?” his mother asked, almost condescending. “You’re barely a man.”

His response was going to be along the lines of how he and his-hopefully-soon-to-be-fiance had just taken out a quarter of mankind’s population – and her concern was if he was old enough to get married. If he was old enough to decimate a population at age ten, he was old enough to get married.

“Dad, how do I do it?” Reiner asked as he twirled the ring between his fingers, examining the way the pewter reflected light in different directions. “Do I need to plan for an occasion? Or a party? Or what?”

“You can do it the way I did for your mother!” he suggested, his shaggy, bearded face showing a bright smile and a loud chuckle. “Get sloshed outta your mind and as you’re throwin’ up in his garden hold out the ring and ask!”

“I should’ve said no.” Reiner’s mother lamented as she stifled a laugh of her own. But twenty years later they were still together and still happy.

Reiner hoped he and Bertholdt could be that way someday.

So he asked Berik instead. Berik had gotten married the year early to his lover Isaac. He was the same age that Reiner was now and he was missing a leg. If he could do it in his state, why couldn’t Reiner?

They had catching up to do first. Berik came home at eleven. As the oldest of the boys, he’d managed to crawl home after being thrown up by that titan, thankful for his regenerative properties and for titans lacking digestive functions. His leg was mangled and had to have it amputated and replaced with a metal prosthetic instead. It didn’t have feeling, nor did it have a real foot, but Isaac made it anyways. Reiner learned Isaac had been the one to build it. To fit Berik with the new leg. To help him recover. And along the way, an eleven year old, then twelve year old – then adult Berik fell in love with the man and before long they were married as well.

He wasn’t the same though. He wasn’t the energetic, wild boy he used to be. He was reserved, patient and still protective as ever. But there was a damage to him now that Reiner assumed could only have come from being eaten.

“You get him when he’s not expecting it.” Berik said surely pointing at Reiner with the air of authority that only a big brother could have. “He’ll be on the spot  and—“

As the two boys spoke, Berik’s words were cut off as Bertholdt announced his return home and slipped into the kitchen pulling off a thick navy scarf dotted with melting flecks of snow.

“Bertholdt, marry me!” Reiner announced loudly, standing up, holding the pewter ring outwards to the boy. His face paled, and narrow eyes grew wide and bright with anticipation. His fingers shook as he held the ring, noticing how Bertholdt had frozen mid step, and Berik had begun to laugh, with some comment of “Well, that’s certainly unexpected.”

Bertholdt looked around, to Berik, to Reiner, to the stove which could use another log tossed in. He stood silently as Reiner pleaded with his eyes for some sort of answer.

“Right now?” he asked, hanging up the scarf.

“I-In the spring!” Reiner announced, his voice loud thick with a stammer. “Or the summer! Or the fall! Or next winter! Bertholdt I don’t care – will you marry me?!”

“Where did you get the ring?” Bertholdt asked. An unnecessary question according to Reiner.

“From my dad, Bertl. Answer the damn question!”

Bertholdt began to pull off his jacket and hang it with the scarf, still seeming to be perplexed with a few other questions. He didn’t ask any of them instead and walked over to Reiner with the most pressing of those dozen options on his lips. “Does it fit?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” Reiner said taking Bertholdt’s hand, slowly sliding the ring over his finger and along the knuckles. It wasn’t a perfect fit. A little loose, but it would work. Reiner looked from the nearly skeletal fingers of Bertholdt’s hand to his face, seeing how those downturned, sad eyes didn’t look so sad anymore.

He almost didn’t notice Berik getting up and calling out: “Mom! Call the elders, Bertl’s getting married!”


End file.
